The Nazi with the beautiful face

El Mundo features a report on its front page about a neo-Nazi group. The headline is: “Isabel Peralta, the 'pretty face' of Núcleo Nacional, the radical group with over 1,000 affiliates”. And it illustrates it with a photo of this 23-year-old woman. One would expect her to be the leader, ideologue, or captain of this troop. But no. Inside the newspaper, we are informed via a quote from an anonymous police source: “She has a speech, she is very committed to these ideas, and she generates attraction because she is very media-savvy in terms of image, but she neither directs in an operational nor ideological way, nor does she mobilize, nor does she have any real weight in the structure. She is a pretty face, who draws attention due to the fact that she is a woman, but nothing more.” So, on what grounds does she deserve to be on the front page? Why don't the police sources explain to us who the mastermind (to put it one way) of this pleasant group is? Doesn't exhibiting her as a pretty face, apart from the obvious sexism, mean taking the bait and pointing to the beautiful moon instead of the festering pustule of a thousand people organized to sow their hate and violence? Even in a report—which, on the other hand, is interesting—must there be the commodification of a woman's body? If she had been as ugly as sin, would they have written about her too? The thesis of the report (and of the police) is that her alleged attractiveness facilitates recruitment, but this is a very risky hypothesis for which no evidence is provided. Perhaps the phenomenon of neo-Nazis deserved a more complex explanation than that of the two wheelbarrows.

Mind you, at least we were able to see El Mundo writing the word far-right, which they deny to a certain party that is about to win a fair number of seats, just in case. Perhaps all of this is an attempt to position those from Vox towards the center-right, by setting up an absolutely minority extreme reference as yet another tactic to normalize this unsettling party.